Insight/Action/Outcome: Looking closer at their two primary personas, the team at Wahi learned that 70% of users convert after a week, and 30% take eight days or longer. Using Amplitude data, however, they noticed that leads that took more than a week to convert were higher quality, so they allocated more resources to focus their efforts on channels that yielded the highest return on investment. They tweaked their communication strategy to boost their lead opportunities, which more than doubled conversions in both cohorts.
For Wahi, data is a compass by which we find the North Star.
Wahi is a Canadian platform for buying and selling homes. We empower homebuyers and sellers to navigate the world of real estate by offering access to market data, agent-level insights on the latest property listings, and the ability to match consumers with the right Realtor. Our market-leading app and tools, like our home value estimator, help Canadians make informed real estate decisions. To do this, we need a lot of data.
Data is a part of Wahi’s culture and process, and we don’t ship anything without proper tracking. We work hard to fold data into our QA team and product design, and we’re always willing to test new ideas and learn from our mistakes. But this isn’t always easy, especially with the different types of leads we drive. We have to think outside the box and carefully categorize a wide variety of users:
- The first user segment includes people looking to buy a home, which usually means they book a showing or chat about a listing. Leads in certain regions are eligible for our MyBuy program, which offers a 1% cashback reward on the sale price if you buy your home with one of Wahi’s virtual Realtors.
- The second major category also includes home buyers who fall outside our MyBuy region. Here, we match the buyer with a Realtor with a proven track record in their area. We always ensure the customer is happy with the Realtor they have been matched with.
Approximately 70% of Wahi’s customers convert to a lead within the first week of their initial engagement with the brand. So the question is, how do we better understand what drives them to convert?
Finding an analytics platform to help answer the right questions
Wahi needed to hit the ground running with their product analytics platform. Amplitude was in our tech stack almost from the start. Almost everyone on the team had used the platform in previous roles, so it was an obvious choice for the first few years. But as our company grew, we started to rely even more heavily on data. So in the spirit of our data-informed approach, we wanted to weigh our options.
This was an opportunity to look at the market and see if we were missing anything. We needed three essential elements from our product analytics platform:
- Flexibility
- Scalability
- Feature-rich design
Amplitude still came out on top, even against other platforms like Mixpanel. Many platforms offer similar features, and bells and whistles. But Amplitude’s features facilitate channel performance improvements in a way that’s second to none.
Empowering channel performance analysis to more than double conversions
Amplitude allows us to dissect and analyze user channels and also perform more granular sub-channel analysis with access to raw data in Snowflake. We use these insights to examine how our various marketing and communication channels impact user engagement, product usage, and lead generation.
With Amplitude, we saw users that were more engaged in the platform before becoming a lead were of higher quality than those with a shorter lead time. This information enabled us to allocate resources more effectively, optimize our marketing strategies, and focus our efforts on channels that yielded the highest return on investment.
Take our two primary personas, for example. We learned that 70% convert after a week and 30% take eight days or longer. But with Amplitude, we saw that users who took longer to convert were higher quality than those with a shorter lead time. This information enabled us to allocate resources more effectively, optimize our marketing strategies, and focus our efforts on channels that yielded the highest return on investment.
Amplitude allowed us to dig deeper into the data in specific ways that other analytics platforms could not. For example, we knew that if users viewed six listings in their first week, that conversion was incredibly high. Getting to six was our magic number. But we wanted to know how quickly they viewed those six listings and how that action impacted conversion. If they viewed six listings in three days, was that better than in seven days? Amplitude gave us that level of granularity.
We've seen that some people will see six listings on their first day (typically users who know exactly what they want and use many filters), while others take a little bit more time. Using this knowledge, we developed ways to optimize communication flows.
If users are still narrowing down their research, we’ve also improved our ability to show them listings quickly and highlight different features on our listings, like school scores. These strategies have boosted our lead opportunities and significantly increased customer retention for two groups: those who looked at six or more listings per week and those who checked out at least one listing every day for at least three days a week. In both cases, retention more than doubled.
We never want to be stuck not being able to answer a question. With Amplitude, we can drill down into specific retention and conversion triggers to see how certain actions might impact them down the line.
Platform integrations offer a 360° view of user journeys and save $25k+ annually
As a property tech company, we rely on various platforms and apps. Amplitude allows us to integrate data from multiple sources so we never have to worry about creating silos in our process.
Amplitude allows us to integrate data from multiple sources so we never have to worry about creating silos in our process.
This capability has been a huge game-changer for us. For most data platforms, integrations can be a six-month project. With Amplitude, all we had to do was clean up the modeling on some tables. In just a few weeks, we integrated:
- Zendesk (for leads)
- HubSpot (for deals)
- SendGrid (for transactional emails)
- OneSignal (for marketing emails)
- Branch (for app attribution)
Our data integrations were almost immediately usable internally. The seamless flow of data has enabled us to gather a holistic view of our users' journey, from acquisition to transaction. We’re also better able to identify pain points, streamline processes, and tailor our offerings to better meet the needs of our different personas.
One of our most significant integrations has been with Snowflake. While we utilize Segment as our Customer Data Platform (CDP), we primarily leverage Amplitude to integrate with Snowflake for Business Intelligence (BI) reporting. We made this decision because of Amplitude's superior schema and its ability to resolve identity across various data sources using the merged ID table—all while adhering to security and compliance policies. I think it would make sense for a lot of companies to go all-in with Amplitude as their CDP.
Cost is another major driver. We’ve saved $25,000 annually just by using Amplitude to process email and push notification data. We also saved thousands of dollars on our LaunchDarkly costs by leveraging Amplitude’s A/B testing and reporting (instead of paying for another experimentation platform).
Amplitude has been a great partner and paid for itself within a year by reducing our reliance on Segment and LaunchDarkly. As a result, we’ve streamlined our data management processes, reduced complexity, and gained actionable insights faster at a much lower cost.
Automated monitoring and alerting
Many companies set their KPIs upfront but don’t establish a way to keep everyone moving forward. At Wahi, we’re big about accessing and disseminating data, and we’ve built data dashboards to help our people stay on the same page.
We’ve seen notable benefits from activating Amplitude’s alerting and monitoring features. These features enable us to track positive and negative alerts, and we can easily detect notable changes in our KPIs. We also added sub-metrics to the KPIs to better understand anything that might have caused our high-level KPIs to drop. Once I receive an Amplitude alert, I check for false positives. If I’m satisfied it’s truly an anomaly, I share it with the appropriate person and we take the necessary steps to find the root cause and adjust.
This proactive approach to monitoring and alerting helps us identify anomalies and deviations from any expected trends. It also allows us to take corrective actions and mitigate any risks before they escalate.
Going above and beyond with deeper data
As Wahi’s head of analytics and optimization, I’ve seen firsthand how Amplitude has enhanced our decision-making processes. We’ve become even more rigorous with tracking, monitoring, and storing data. Amplitude has also helped us triangulate our data to explore our marketing outcomes within various segments. Today, we can identify the most effective channels for specific personas, which means we can create targeted campaigns to maximize conversion rates and ultimately contribute to business growth.
Are we building the right things? Are we taking the right actions? What's the rationale behind this decision? Today, we answer all these questions through our data-informed product discovery process that begins with Amplitude.
The more insights we connect to ideas, the more confident we are in our product. Are we building the right things? Are we taking the right actions? What’s the rationale behind this decision? Today, we answer all these questions through our data-informed product discovery process that begins with Amplitude.
